Serving content with unknown demand
Sharayu Moharir, Javad Ghaderi, Sujay Sanghavi, Sanjay Shakkottai · 2014
In this paper we look at content placement in the high-dimensional regime: there are n servers, and O(n) distinct types of content. Each server can store and serve O(1) types at any given time. Demands for these content types arrive, and have to be served in an online fashion; over time, there are a total of O(n) of these demands. We consider the algorithmic task of content placement: determining which types of content should be on which server at any given time, in the setting where the demand statistics (i.e. the relative popularity of each type of content) are not known a-priori, but have to be inferred from the very demands we are trying to satisfy. This is the high-dimensional regime because this scaling (everything being O(n)) prevents consistent estimation of demand statistics; it models many modern settings where large numbers of users, servers and videos/webpages interact in this way.